Updates introduced to this 1950 home in Idylwood over the past 5 years played up its midcentury roots. Listed Thursday, the compact-but-complete property is asking $223,900. Brays Bayou is a block or so up the street. Gus Wortham Golf Course and the Sisters of Charity of the Incarnate Word’s Villa de Matel (and its chiming carillon) are also nearby.
The rather restrained and carefully appointed front lawn of this 1980 brick-box home makes the barely tamed nature center installed on its back lot an unexpected twist. A series of wooden decks, patios, terraces, garden follies, and walkways meander through the half-acre ravine property like a theme park’s winding queue, peppered with distracting greenery. The outdoor ensemble overlooks Spring Branch Creek, beyond which a detention pond and the Katy Freeway feeder road lie:
Smile and step carefully. No fewer than 16 security cameras are installed in this battened-down Braeburn Acres property, a 2007 custom design by Cameron Architects. It’s a big, big stucco-over-concrete-block house — more than 10,000 sq. ft. — with 50 stone columns supporting a double-decker carousel of arches and tile-topped rotundas. The cleared 1.2-acre lot includes a pool-in-progress and very little landscaping (other than lawn). Maybe that explains why a cartoony rendering (at top) is employed as the listing’s featured photo.
COMMENT OF THE DAY: REAL ESTATE LISTING PHOTOS WITH THAT LITTLE EXTRA SOMETHING “I know exactly how this house must smell. And I love it.” [Miz Brooke Smith, commenting on A Woodsy, Bayou-Side Meadowbrook Home]
Dark-stained flooring and darker-stained paneling, cabinetry, and such transform parts of this 1955 ranchburger into something akin to an in-country cabin. The home and its woodsy lot sit off a shoot of Sims Bayou in Meadowbrook, near Old Galveston Rd. south of Park Place Blvd. Last week, not long after its initial listing in late March, the recently re-mulched property with the shingled-cottage mailbox dropped its asking price $5K — to $134,999.
Before this property in the secluded Tall Timbers section of River Oaks was a colorful contemporary by Carlos Jiménez, it was a much smaller home by San Antonio architect O’Neil Ford. Its acre of pie-shaped lot off a winding lane has wide-side frontage along Buffalo Bayou. The property atop rugged terrain listed a week ago with an initial asking price of $4,995,000.